Russia Detains Hundreds of Protesters

Police officers detain protesters in Moscow's Pushkin Square on Monday, after demonstrators refused to leave at the end of an anti-Putin rally.
Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

By

Alan Cullison,

Alexander Kolyandr and

Richard Boudreaux

Updated March 6, 2012 11:16 a.m. ET

MOSCOW—Riot police detained hundreds of opposition protesters in the Russian capital and St. Petersburg on Monday after activists contesting Vladimir Putin's election as president tried to occupy a Moscow square in a bid to force his ouster.

The crackdown in Moscow, where three opposition leaders were held by police, came at the end of an authorized two-hour rally in Pushkin Square by more than 20,000 people. The detentions marked a turning point for a movement that has drawn tens of thousands of people to the streets of large cities over the past three months demanding clean elections and an end to autocratic rule. The movement has gained few concessions from Russia's leaders and, some activists said, appeared to be running out of energy and new ideas.

The day after Sunday's presidential elections, protestors came out by the thousands to demonstrate against Vladimir Putin, whom they say was voted in to power through rigged elections. WSJ's Greg White reports. Photo: Getty.

Protesters in both cities risked a police clampdown by pushing the regime's limits of tolerance, a day after Mr. Putin, who is now prime minister, won a third presidential term in an election international observers said was predetermined and marred by irregularities.

Since early December, when protests erupted over a disputed parliamentary election, the movement's leaders had obtained government permission for their rallies and police had refrained from large-scale detentions.

Police moved in after anticorruption blogger Alexei Navalnyi and other protesters vowed to camp there in and around a fountain until Mr. Putin steps down.

Mass Rally Against Putin's Win

Reuters

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More than 220 people were detained, including Mr. Navalnyi and two other protest leaders, Ilya Yashin and Sergei Udaltsov, the Interfax news agency reported. About 50 other protesters elsewhere in Moscow and dozens in St. Petersburg were detained trying to hold unauthorized rallies. Mr. Navalnyi was later released.

Mr. Putin ignored the criticism of Sunday's election and congratulated three of his four handpicked opponents, thanking them for a contest in which "there wasn't much dirt." Mr. Putin claimed 64% of the vote and is set to take office May 7.

The Russian leader hasn't budged on opposition demands for a rerun of December parliamentary elections or an investigation of alleged vote fraud that has allowed his party, United Russia, to dominate Parliament.

But in a bid to quell the protests, President Dmitry Medvedev said on Monday that he was ordering a review of the conviction of jailed oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky and more than 30 others whom the opposition consider to be political prisoners. He also asked the Justice Ministry to explain its rejection last year of the registration of an opposition political party, the People's Freedom Party.

Monday's opposition rally in Moscow drew many of the young middle-class Muscovites who have turned out by the tens of thousands for four previous demonstrations in this winter's bone-chilling cold.

Russia's state-run television carried footage of the rally, saying protesters were "unhappy with the results of the election." It gave equal coverage to another pro-Putin rally of much smaller numbers near the walls of the Kremlin.

Sunday's election created a predicament for Western leaders who must deal with Mr. Putin as Russia's leader despite "bad" or "very bad" irregularities reported by Western election observers Monday at one-third of the polling stations.

"There was no real competition, and abuse of government resources ensured that the ultimate winner of the election was never in doubt," said Tonino Picula, head of the short-term observer mission of the Organization of Security and Cooperation in Europe.

In Washington, the State Department issued a statement congratulating the Russian people on completing elections, without mentioning Mr. Putin. The State Department said it endorsed the OSCE report.

"There will be appropriate statements with names in them after the election has been certified by people far more high than me," said State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland.

In France, French President Nicolas Sarkozy on Monday wrote to Mr. Putin to congratulate him on his victory and said he hopes to build better relations between Russia and the European Union. In Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkel said she would call Mr. Putin to "wish him success" but said Russia needed more political freedom.

One of Mr. Putin's opponents, Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov, refused to accept the result as legitimate and didn't accept the invitation to meet with Mr. Putin at his suburban residence.

Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski tweeted that it was "a sign of the times" when a Communist leader laments over the state of Russian democracy.

Kremlin critics said it is hard to gauge the real support for Mr. Putin in Russia. Although pollsters continually take readings of his popularity, they said many fear answering the question of who they would vote for because of Russia's authoritarian government structure.

But the election observer group Golos said on Monday that the margin of Mr. Putin's victory Sunday was unrealistic by any measure. Two exit polls, both conducted by pro-Kremlin sociological groups, had estimated that Mr. Putin would garner 58%-59% of the vote on Election Day, said Grigory Melkonyants, deputy executive director of the vote-monitoring group Golos. Mr. Putin's claim of 64% is "outside the margin of error," he said.

Western election observers said Sunday's presidential poll was in some respects cleaner than the parliamentary contest in December that sparked widespread demonstrations against vote fraud, and prompted thousands of Russians to volunteer as election monitors on Sunday. The Kremlin, trying to get ahead of the movement, also installed web cameras at 97,000 polling places around the country.

Mr. Melkonyants said the Kremlin merely relied more heavily on forms of falsification that weren't easily caught by web cameras and vote observers. There were numerous reports, he said, of so-called carousels—busloads of people who were ferried to several polling places so they could vote several times. Also reported was misuse of voter registration lists, allowing the pro-Kremlin functionaries to create phantom voters and cast their ballots.

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